Palos Verdes High School junior Kelsey Farman had been driving for just five months when her mother suggested she change lanes as the pair drove to pick up her prom dress.

Oops, not that lane — the other lane. Farman promptly collided with another car as she attempted to make the maneuver.

So Farman — and her mom, Tracy, of Rancho Palos Verdes — were prime candidates to take part in Torrance-based Toyota’s Driving Expectations program, aimed at new drivers and their parents.

Except Farman’s daughter didn’t quite see it that way at first.

“She didn’t think this was cool,” said Tracy Farman. “She thought this was like punishment.”

It isn’t, though.

The idea behind the program is to teach inexperienced drivers techniques for becoming safer drivers.

“There’s no room for on-the-job training when you’re on the freeway,” lead driving instructor Jeff Bodnar told the adolescent students at the outset of the free, four-hour class. “That’s why you’re here.”

And instructors provide a series of grisly statistics at the start of the course to drive the point home:

A total of 7,650 teenagers are killed annually on U.S. roads, making vehicle accidents the leading cause of death for those in the 16-to-20 age bracket.

In almost 60percent of those deaths, the person failed to wear a seatbelt.

One in five teens have an accident during their first year driving.

Teenage drivers are twice as likely to be involved in a fatal accident than the rest of the driving population.

Making an effort to reduce those statistics is what Driving Expectations is all about.

Toyota has offered the program across the country since 2004; this summer, it returns to the South Bay for the first time in five years.

About 360 teenagers took part last weekend and classes will be offered again Aug. 8-9 at Toyota’s national headquarters on Western Avenue. For more information or to sign up, go to Toyota’s Driving Expectatons Web site.

Through a series of classroom sessions and hands-on driving demonstrations led by professional drivers teenagers learn the dos and don’ts of driving.

“We have them for four hours,” said Mike Kroll, who oversees the program. (Their parents) have them for a lifetime.”

At the same time at least one parent of the teenage students takes a similar, but separate, class.

On a “distraction” course, for instance, all students learn the perils of driving while music blasts from a radio or what can happen if they’re preoccupied with their passengers.

Nick Green is the longtime soccer columnist for the Southern California Newspaper Group and covers Torrance, Lomita and the craft beer industry for the Daily Breeze. He also blogs about soccer at www.insidesocal.com/soccer, the local craft beer scene at www.insidesocal.com/beer and the South Bay at blogs.dailybreeze.com/southbay/. The native of England lives in Old Torrance with his wife and two cats.

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